Thirsty North Bay gets water funds, tackles regulations

NORTH COAST – As the North Bay faces the potential of a third dry year, commerce and agriculture face both boosts and barriers from government in getting enough water to stay in business.

The prospects for easing long-term water-supply issues in some of the North Bay’s thirstiest areas improved dramatically last week when President Obama signed a spending bill that authorized $25 million for the estimated $100 million first phase of recycled-water projects in Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties.

“This authorization is certainly good news, but there is a lot of work to be done,” said Felix Riesenberg, principal Napa County water resources engineer partly overseeing the Milliken-Sarco-Tulucay Creek Recycled Water Project, commonly called MST. “The next step is to get the money appropriated.”

The project, located in the groundwater-sparse area east and northeast of Napa, is part of the North Bay Water Recycling Program that received authorization in the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act. Other projects in the program are recycled-water extensions in Sonoma Valley and continued Napa Salt Marsh restoration.

At the same time, headway made over the past few years between North Coast agriculture and water regulators hit a snag after a recent accusation from a federal agency that the death of protected fish in two waterways in Sonoma and Mendocino counties coincided with water drawn for vine frost protection, according to Nick Frey, president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission.

“The letter from the enforcement arm of NMFS didn’t do any good, but we salvaged that,” Mr. Frey said. A February letter from National Marine Fisheries Service enforcement officers to the State Water Resources Board recommended swift action to control frost-control water use this spring.

Mendocino County cattle rancher Peter Bradford, a California Farm Bureau Federation board director for Mendocino and Lake counties, said that restrictions for drawing water from the Russian River, mandated under Assembly Bill 1610 to save water for protected fish, may have eased at the upper end of the river this frost season.

“Our latest understanding is that we will be allowed to pump for frost protection, but looking down the road we do not know about summer usage for irrigation,” Mr. Bradford said. Such an irrigation cutback could force his family to cull their beef cattle herd that grazes along the Russian River, similar to what ranchers in Sonoma and especially Marin counties had to do in the past couple of dry seasons.

The state water board will hold a workshop in Sacramento on the matter Tuesday, April 7.

The winegrape commission and other local fisheries service officials have been part of a public-private group called the Sonoma County Salmonid Coalition. The group has been looking for ways that property owners in Dry Creek, Alexander and Knights valleys can farm while water quality and quantity needed for protected fish is restored.

Grower trade groups are set to meet today with fisheries service officials to try to finalize best-management practices that could be a prelude to a system for Section 4(d) “special take” consultations with the service under the Endangered Species Act, according to Mr. Frey.

Meanwhile, water agencies involved in the North Bay Water Reuse Authority, which governs the North Bay Water Recycling Program, are looking for ways to come up with the other three-quarters of the funding for the first phase, according to North Bay Water Reuse Authority Program Manager Chuck Weir. Possible sources could be a state revolving fund set to get hundreds of millions of dollars of economic stimulus money and $134 million for Bay Area water, park and coastal restoration projects from the Proposition 84 bond of 2006.

However, federal funds require local money, so some North Bay projects are being resized to reduce any payments from property owners. For example, the planned size of the MST project in Napa has been scaled back to 400 to 500 acre-feet of recycled water for irrigation at Napa Valley Golf & Country Club and up to 20 vineyards from the 1,937 acre-feet currently being studied in the North Bay program’s environmental-impact document. That lowered the construction cost from $40 million to $13 million, according to Mr. Riesenberg.

The draft environmental document is due to be released in May.